Over the past few weeks, FiveThirtyEight has explored who led in early primary polls of presidential cycles from 1972 to 2016 and who went on to win the nomination. And what we’ve seen is that national surveys conducted in the year before a presidential primary are relatively good indicators of which candidates will advance to the general election, especially when polling averages are adjusted to reflect how well known each candidate was. Now, in the third and final part of our series, we are going to analyze 40-plus years of polls to better understand their predictive power. CONT.
Geoffrey Skelley, FiveThirtyEight